He didn’t know the whole truth. Perhaps he never would. Truth was an elusive quality in the business he was engaged in. But he was about to understand another component.
A moment later, the door from the outer office opened and a short, thin black man entered, holding a laptop computer under his arm.
“Harry,” Director Lay began, “Carter’s going to bring us up to speed on the trailers. Do you have the data with you, Ron?”
“The trailers at the site of the abandoned camp?” Harry asked, reaching out to shake Carter’s hand. The African-American analyst acknowledged him with a curt nod and set his computer down on the director’s desk, clearly consumed by his own thoughts. Harry smiled. He and Ron Carter went a long way back, and he had learned to never underestimate the man’s abilities. Despite his occasional penchant for anti-social behavior, Carter was the best photo-analyst the Agency had, possessing as well a knack for managing field-ops that had caused Kranemeyer to draft him from the Intelligence Directorate two years before.
Carter nodded, setting the laptop on Lay’s desk and swiveling the screen so that all could see. A picture of one of the trailers filled the screen. “I started running the photos through our database the minute we picked them up. It took a while to get a match, but here it is.”
“What were they?”
“They are almost identical to the biological-warfare trailers used by Saddam Hussein in the ‘90s,” Carter stated, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “But these aren’t them.”
“Where did they get them?”
“If you’ll remember, Harry, three years ago a CIA spec-ops team was parachuted into Azerbaijan to interdict a shipment of arms from Russia to Iran.”
Harry closed his eyes and nodded. He remembered all too well. For he had led that mission. He remembered the HAHO — High Altitude, High Opening insertion from the C-130, descending slowly into the wintry Azeri night. Into the darkness below them. He and nine others, two full strike teams, Alpha and Charlie. They had believed the Russians were selling nuclear weapons. And they’d been ordered to stop the convoy at all costs. At all costs, indeed.
Two of the men had been killed on landing, one of them apparently dragged over a cliff by the wind. The rest had been scattered — scattered to the winds. Three of them were never heard from again. He and the four survivors managed to regroup and head for the bridge where they were to intercept the convoy. By the time they got there, the convoy was long gone, only tire tracks in the snow indicating its passage. They had been too late. And then the Azeri military had started looking for them.
The journey to the extraction zone was a memory he wanted to forget. The harsh winter winds tearing into them. The snows. The caves he and the others took shelter in to hide from the helicopters searching for them.
The hunger. The thirst only barely assuaged by eating the snow. The bitter cold. The brief firefight with an Azeri patrol as the Pave Low pulled them from a hot LZ. The names of the men who had perished. Oh, he remembered, all right.
“Yes,” he replied, his tone cold. Emotionless.
“These bio-war trailers were part of that shipment.”
“I see.”
“What’s it all about, sir?”
“We’ll find out when we get there,” Jack Richards replied sharply, turning away from his companion and looking out the window, his signature Stetson pulled down low over coal-black eyes. His face was tanned and leathery, his swarthy complexion due in part to his maternal grandfather, a Mescalero Apache. He had grown up on his family’s ranch in Texas, part of the reason his friends called him “Tex.”
A former Marine Force Recon demolitions specialist, the Texan had joined the Clandestine Service five years before, at the age of twenty-nine.
Naturally silent, few people understood him, fewer still could be considered his friends — to say he was bad at making conversation would have been a polite understatement.
He rarely opened his mouth unless he had something important to say, and when he did, people listened. Listened to his experience.
But he was unusual, all the same. He even looked at buildings differently from others. Other men looked at them and admired their architectural beauty or the lack thereof, thought of the people inside, or ignored them entirely. Not Richards. He mentally calculated the pounds of high explosive needed to bring them down. It was good practice.
He was currently teaching a course on demolitions to the new recruits at the Farm, which was why the call of a few hours earlier had surprised him. Deployment orders. Where, he knew not. Looking at the young man at his side, though, he had some idea.
The agent was of Middle-Eastern descent. What country, he had never asked. He had never needed to know…
Davood Sarami finally decided he wasn’t likely to get any more answers from the big Texan, so he copied the older man’s example by staring out the window of the helicopter, staring down at his adopted land.
The nation he had taken an oath to protect. The son of Iranian-American immigrants, he and the rest of his community had received a rude awakening on the morning of September 11th, 2001. They and the rest of the world.
He had sat in his father’s living room, watching as America’s might came toppling to the ground. Watching — and for the first time questioning the faith he had known all his life. Questioning how terrorists could cling to the same holy scriptures that he did, the sacred words of Allah.
And he no longer knew what he believed…
“As you already know, if you’ve been following the news,” Lay began, picking up the briefing where Carter had left off, “the situation in Iran has changed dramatically over the last few years. With the rise to power of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps following the death of Khamenei two years ago we’ve seen Iran morph into a true praetorian state under the leadership of former Guards’ commander Mahmoud F’azel Shirazi. The clerical oligarchy of the mullahs is still intact, but exists largely at the good grace of the IRGC.”
He passed a photo across the desk to Harry before continuing. “That’s Shirazi. We had initially hoped that this transition might curb some of the evangelical fervor that had characterized the leadership of Khamenei, but we were mistaken. If anything, Shirazi makes Khamenei’s disciple and successor, the Ayatollah Youssef Mohaymen Isfahani, almost look like a moderate.”
Harry nodded. “That’s a significant statement.”
“Under Shirazi’s leadership, Iran has reached an uneasy detente with the West, but most believe it to be the calm before the storm. They’ve expanded their influence over Iraq, with Iranian-backed Shiite candidates gaining a majority in parliament during the last elections. Much of the same thing is happening all across the Stans,” Lay added, referring to the small Muslim countries north and east of Iran, most of them former members of the Soviet bloc and whose names all ended in “stan”.
“IRGC-owned companies now control between sixty and seventy percent of the Iranian economy, which is not to say they allow any real competition in the remaining percentage. The ranks of the Basij militia have swelled in the last year and it’s believed they have resumed covert negotiations with North Korea. Trouble is coming — it’s only a question of when and where.”
A knock came at that moment. “Come in,” Director Lay called as his secretary entered the room.
“Mr. Richards’ helicopter is landing, sir.”
The CIA director smiled briefly. “Thank you, Margaret.” She disappeared and he turned his attention back to the men in front of him. “Why don’t we go down to the Operations Center and meet up with Richards?”